She will remember the river, when the water combed through the ends of her silver hair and made it heavy, slick, and glistening, against her skin. She will remember the starlight reflecting off her skin and the beads of water along her back that seemed more like pearls then. She will remember the first touch; lips so soft against her forehead, her cheek. She will remember their bodies intertwined, and how the space between their bodies had never been less and still it was not close enough. She will remember, and it will have to be enough.
‘She wasn’t our prize,’ Cordis answers, and she is too busy thinking about the things that she will remember to realize the malice wrought through her sentences. Their daughter had felt like a prize. She had felt like the conclusion the deserved, the one that they had scraped, and fought, and clawed to get. She had felt like the conclusion that was right. This one feels so wrong.
“I think this will consume us,” Spyndle reaffirms, beneath her breath, as soft as the spring breeze through the eyelets of the leaves, so soft it is nearly lost.
Every second matters, and every second feels eternal.
She is dying with every wasted breath that they take. She is dying in the fractions of seconds that exist between the heaves of their chests, and the sounds of their words. She is dying; skin peeled back and bones laid bare. She is dying, and every second buries her deeper. She was theirs. She is theirs.
So, Spyndle makes the only choice she can.
She makes it for both of them, because they both know where this road leads even if neither has been willing to say it aloud until now: “I don’t think that I can let myself love you knowing what I’ve done for you.” Loving Cordis is dangerous, but never in the ways she had expected it to be.
“I can’t. I can’t.”
And they have come full circle.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know